But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not…

Common sense … has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal…

— Russell L. Ackoff

“Weick, we can only make sense of life retrospectively, even though it must be lived prospectively.”

— Peter Fuda

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature…

— Evelyn Waugh

When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do.

— Jack Nicholson

I try not to think retrospectively. It's important, as an artist, to look forward, always. I do try to take work that involves some…

— Cillian Murphy

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects…

— George Saunders

Looking at myself retrospectively, how I survived, how I was reactionary as my surroundings were ever changing and I didn't have time to make…

— Julia Fox

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.

— Anonymous

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

— Thomas Carlyle

A lot of people pass off adolescent depression as something trivial.

— Lacey Sturm

When you say too much about anything important, it always ends up sounding more trivial than it is. Words trash it.

— Megan McCafferty

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

— Aldo Leopold

“...anything I do is trivial and meaningless because I'm not in a relationship and I don't have children.”

— Dolly Alderton

A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat.

— David D. Burns